Highlight an empty home’s layout with staging

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Many times, new layouts in old homes can and do confuse buyers. Where would the sofa go? What about the television? Where do you eat? This is especially true in Washington, DC, where many times the row homes were built with walls and distinct functions per room, and later developers and contractors removed the majority of the interior walls, giving the old home a new and open floor plan.

Home staging helps to answer tough design-related questions for potential buyers, so they can instantly see how they might live in the space. Below are some before-and-after pictures taken of a recently completed vacant staging project in Washington DC.

This is the main family room space, with the picture being taken from the kitchen/bar point of view.

Now is the after: You can see the sofa in the foreground with additional seating featured across the room. The picture also gives a sense of space in the room — there is a good amount of it! And notice the addition of the window seat in the bay window.

Now for the master bedroom. The room sits just above the family room, so the bay window feature is found in this room as well.

And the after picture has a bit more of the room, again giving a nice spatial sense of the room and how it could be pulled together.

You almost lose the sense that this bedroom is in the city — with the sun filtering through the tree and the blinds.

A properly staged space can help buyers get a sense of how to live in the space, reduce the number of guessing games and hopefully bring in offers quickly.

Roslyn Ashford, MBA, is a former corporate recruiter turned home stager, and native Washingtonian (as in DC). She hosts a bi-weekly tweet chat for home stagers and loves to stage small and vacant homes. Learn more about her growing company here or follow her on Twitter to keep up with the daily hilarity!

Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or position of Zillow.